Scientific research funded by the European taxpayer should be freely available to everyone over the internet, according to a European commission report - a blow to the lucrative scientific publishing operations of media groups such as Reed Elsevier and Germany's Springer.

The report, produced by economists from Toulouse University and the Free University of Brussels for the EC, shows that in the 20 years to 1995 the price of scientific journals rose 300% more than the rate of inflation over the period. In the 10 years since then, price increases slowed but still significantly outpaced inflation.

"While it is important to stress the societal value of the existing publication system, it is also important to acknowledge the societal cost linked to high journal prices, in financial terms for public budgets, but also in terms of limits on the dissemination of knowledge and therefore of further scientific progress," the report concludes.

The report, published this month and open to consultation until the summer, recommends open access to publicly funded research. It proposes that researchers who receive EU funding should be "mandated" to place copies of articles published in subscription journals on web-based archives that can be accessed by everyone for free.

The worry for traditional publishers such as Reed, Springer, Blackwell and the hundreds of learned societies that make their money through journals, is that if research is available for free on the internet no one will pay subscriptions.

The EC's recommendation - for what is known as author self-archiving - is similar to proposals from the UK's science and technology select committee in the summer of 2004. That proposal received a lukewarm response from the British government and the idea was branded as "daft" by Reed's chief executive, Sir Crispin Davis. Reed yesterday welcomed the EC report as a further contribution to the debate over scientific publishing.

Peter Willis, Liberal Democrat MP for Harrogate and Knaresborough and current chair of the science and technology select committee, described the EC report as "a good trigger for the UK government and science minister Lord Sainsbury to say this is something we support as well".

"I am delighted at the EC's recommendations and indeed hope it will act as a catalyst for the UK government to apply similar principles to the publishing market in the UK," he said. "Now is the time to bite the bullet and say this is the future of publishing."

The British government is rumoured to have lobbied hard for open access to scientific research as part of the EU's approach to funding research. Rather than spread the cash available for research across all 25 member states, as some governments had suggested, Britain pushed for funding to go to the best research institutions. But any research produced should be made available to every member state because all had paid for it, the UK argument ran.

Last year, Research Councils UK, which covers Britain's eight public research funders, suggested making it a condition of grants that study results be placed in archives as soon as possible. That drew a barrage of criticism from traditional publishers and a finalised policy statement on open access has yet to emerge.

The EC report also recommends experimenting with new forms of "open access publishing", whereby researchers pay for their articles to be published free to all on the internet.

BioMed Central, for example, publishes 110 open access journals in the fields of biology and medicine.

Its publisher, Matthew Cockerill, said of the EC report: "It confirms what BioMed Central has been saying for some time - that scientists and funders are getting a poor deal from the traditional publishing system, which delivers limited access at high cost."